David Harsent - Night

David Harsent, Night (Faber)

After Don Paterson's Rain and Muldoon's Maggot on a theme of decay and Sean O'Brien's November forthcoming, David Harsent's Night has another of this generation of poets providing dark poems for our dark times. It is O'Brien, in The Drowned Book, that he most resembles here in these poems of nightmare underworlds, often dark and usually when it's raining, that describe a limbo, a purgatory existence.
There are memories but there's no specific destination in the wanderings or situations of the characters here and they are either sustained or ruined -hard to say which- by alcohol, which is most often gin. But this discomfiture is something we are becoming accustomed to and it is portrayed almost relentlessly here in a long poem of 721 lines, Elsewhere, a long night's journey of strange encounters impressive for its insistence and shifting rhyme scheme.

Ghosts is an early highlight, who 'bring/a dew of death that settles on picture frames,/on pelmets, on clothes in the closet, on books...' from their other world with its 'undrinkable rivers, its scrubland of snarls and hooks..'. Immaculately imagined, the poem is a simple construction made discursive by the listing technique of these phrases, a distended form of sentence that often includes that sort of hendiadys doubling of 'fun and games' and 'snarls and hooks' and a use of familiar phrases, like the ending here on,
bearing a look
of matchless sorrow as would, for sure,
stop the heart of whoever it is they take you for.

The Hut in Question deliberately seeks out the hut in which Edward Thomas sheltered and experienced so much rain; The Death of Cain is 'from the Cornish, 1611' and uses his example of a cursed outsider and Necrophilia seems to find advantages in 'nothing of jealousy, no risk of bliss,/the wide, white eye; the perfect parting kiss'. The subject matter is carefully selected to fit the themes of desolation, loss and limbo.
The title poem in ten sections is a sleepless night of meditation on horror and anxieties, some bitterness from a broken relationship, the 'gulp and lurch of apnoea' and a catalogue of fears. Nothing like the catalogue of Elsewhere, though, an encyclopedia of night-time underworld that turns out to be what the earlier shorter poems were only building towards, a journey (to take just a short sample from one list),
past walk-up and rack-rent,
past casinos and clubs and shebeens, past Mr. Moon's
Tattoo Shack, past day-for-night hotels, past cash-
on-the-nail, past rat-runs and bargain bazaars, arcades,

dives and dumps, cross-cuts, bootleg cabs...

for almost as long as you could want. And eventually it comes back to what had set it off,
that mournful music, her face in the glass, the sting of gin on my lip.

We are simply not used to poems as long as this these days and so it comes as a bit of a challenge but it's not difficult otherwise and is worth the effort as a coda to an excellent collection, the collection being the real unit of currency here, working as a book as well as individual poems.
It's a bleak vision but a sustained one, sustained in fact by those other poets in concert with Harsent.
The poets seem to be telling us that these are dark times that have crept up on us from somewhere.